Beating Overwhelm, with Mridu Parikh The Productive Woman

Speaker, author, wife, and mom Mridu Parikh minimizes overwhelm by ordering her days intentionally.







Beating overwhelm with intentionality and simplicity



Mridu Parikh is a speaker, author, and coach who loves to help ambitious women feel in control of their time, energy, and habits, even when they're overwhelmed by demands and distractions. She’s also a wife and the mother of two sons. She and her family live in Nashville, Tennessee.



Mridu began her career as a professional organizer, so she's always been into simplifying, streamlining, and organizing. As her family and business grew, she evolved from organizing her home into organizing her time. Now she helps other women who are overwhelmed with all the demands on their lives to become more streamlined and efficient.



A typical day



Mridu's "typical day" has evolved over the last couple of years. Her biggest productivity challenges come when the children are home. Right now, it's summer break, and the kids are home, so she tends to fall off her routine more often.



A purposeful morning routine



That being said, when the kids are in school, Mridu gets up around 5:45 a.m. and starts her day around 6. She spends the first 15 minutes of her day to wake herself up and get ready for the day. At 6, she'll sit down with her cup of coffee and meditate for about 5-10 minutes using a guided meditation app (Insight Timer).



Next, she gets some type of physical activity in, with anywhere between 7 minutes of Yoga to 45 minutes of walking.



Finally, she'll write down her top goals for the day in her journal.



Doing these three things helps her tremendously in setting up her day. Any time she misses these routines, she feels a bit off.



The rest of her day



After her morning hour, Mridu loads the kids in the car and drive them to school.  When she gets back home, she showers, dresses, and gets ready to start her day by 9 am.



She tries to keep the first hour of her workday (which she calls her Power Hour) free of phone calls or appointments. This is when she tries to get the things done that she knows won't get done later in the day. It's her time to focus on the things she knows she'll procrastinate on later.



Her workday ends somewhere between 3 and 5 depending on her kids' schedules. She spends her afternoons usually driving her kids around to different activities.



Once they're back home, they'll have dinner, clean up, and often sit in the same space to work or do homework together.



Before going to bed, she spends about 20-30 minutes tidying up and looking at her calendar to see what she can do that evening to prepare for the next day. She sets her coffee to brew, and she also goes into her Gratitude app to record the things she's grateful for.



Using a move to a new city as a chance to re-set



Prior to becoming a personal organizer, Mridu worked long hours at a corporate job and seldom got to see her children. The family's move to Nashville was her opportunity to start something new. She thought she would enjoy her new work as a personal organizer because she loved organizing, but she quickly realized she didn't enjoy doing it for other people. Not only was the job physically taxing, but the people she helped were unable to maintain the organized space, and she would go back over and over again to organize the same space multiple times.



What she realized was her clients weren't learning from her, but rather leaning on her to do it for them.



That's when she realized she had fallen out of love of the work she was doing, and she wanted to be a coach so she could teach women strategies and skills to organize for themselves.